Garmin + Me = LOVE

As some of you may know, last Saturday was Taylor's 26th birthday. You may also know that we are training for the Chicago Marathon on October 10 (the date is 10/10/10, in case you find that sort of thing interesting). So, Taylor's parents decided to get Taylor a GPS watch by Garmin for his birthday. I have to say, I love this gift as much as, if not more than, Taylor himself does. While I've always fallen into the Tom Tom camp when it comes to vehicular GPS devices, Garmin makes a stellar GPS watch.

The whole idea of the watch is to track your running via satellite, just like the GPS for your car. This allows you to track your distance, route, pace, elevation changes, and many other statistics related to your run. We've tried our watch out a few times and I really love it. Here are just some of the cool features:

• You can program it to ring at specific distance intervals, so ours chimes every quarter mile.
• The watch displays your current pace and (optionally) your average pace for the run. I find this really helpful for both long runs and faster workouts.
• The watch really does track your movements almost to the foot. I have noticed that even when I run on a different side of the street than I did previously, it notices.
• The watch also comes with a wireless hear monitor (which we have yet to use).
  
• You can program the watch to be your "virtual partner." This means that you can tell it ahead of time how fast you want to go for the run, and the watch will keep track of how far ahead or behind you are of you goal pace. Here's a shot of the screen (on a stranger's arm). The little guy on top shows if you are ahead or behind your goal. The bottom tells you by how many feet you are ahead/behind (black means behind, white would mean ahead).
  
• Here's an example of the type of data we can download after our runs. This is from our run today which was Taylor's longest run ever, 16.75 miles! One issue with the Garmin, especially in the city, is that it has trouble loading satellites when it is near tall buildings or trees. That's why our run only shows 16 miles, we didn't get satellite service until about .75 miles into our run.
  
  The run was really fun, we ran all the way from our apartment, up to the George Washington Bridge, and back. So basically you could say we ran to New Jersey and back. Good times!
  

A big thanks to the Smiths for this great gift! Hopefully it will help us hit our goal for 4 hours for the marathon!!

Weekend in Michigan/Ohio - Recap

A couple of weeks ago, Taylor and I headed to Ohio/Michigan to visit my fam, so I thought I'd post a quick recap. It was a VERY busy weekend but we had fun!

Friday
We woke up at about 4am on Friday to get to the airport by 5:15 for our 6:10 flight. My mom picked us up from the airport at about 8am and we went and had brunch with my Grandma Lucyk at Bob Evans (always a fave!). After spending some time with Grandma Lucyk, we headed to Ann Arbor so Taylor could check out their business school. It was a beautiful day and the campus, the business school, and the surrounding area were all really nice. I have to say the highlight of Ann Arbor, though, was when we first drove in to what might be considered the "collegey" part of town and the first thing we see is a guy wearing no shirt with a beard and a hairy chest. He walked out of his front door, stood on his porch and did the best crazy-college-guy-just-waking-up-after-a-bender stretch. All I could think was "we have entered college-ville."

After visiting Michigan, we headed to Toledo just in time to take a quick nap before heading out for dinner to celebrate my birthday with my family. We went to my FAVORITE place in Toledo, an Italian restaurant called Zia's. I'm not sure how great the rest of Zia's food is, but their pizza's are AMAZING. There were 7 of us (Mom, Dad, me, Taylor, Garett, Taryn and her boyfriend Aaron), and we polished off two of their huge meat-lovers pizzas pretty easily. Here are some good photos from dinner.

My birthday present was a charm bracelet from Brighton!
The sibs
Sibs + significant others
The whole fam outside the restaurant on the mighty Maumee River. That's downtown Toledo in the background.

By Friday night we were super tired from being up at 4am so we went to sleep pretty early!

Saturday
Saturday morning, Taylor and I got up and went for a 10 mile run through Perrysburg, Maumee and Toledo. It was a nice day, but I didn't feel that great on the run.

After the run we grabbed lunch at a great little Mediterranean place in dowtown Perrysburg and then headed home to clean up. On Saturday afternoon, we headed up to my Aunt and Uncle's house in Michigan for my cousin's son's first birthday (I think that makes him my second cousin). Ethan was born last August and this was the first time I got to meet him, so that was really nice. I also got to meet my cousin Vicki's (Ethan's Mom's) husband Herschel. And THEN I got to meet my cousin Stacey's boyfriend Pete. The gang was all there!

The party was really a good time and the weather was great. After that, we headed home and spent the evening playing games and just hanging out.

Sunday
On Sunday, we spent the day at our friends the Monroes' cottage on Archer Lake in Michigan. My mom knows how much I miss being able to just go hang out at the lake, so she did a great job arranging for a full day of fun in the sun and on the water. Thanks, Mom!

We got there at around 10am and proceeded to lay in the sun, float on rafts in the lake, kayak, ride waverunners, go out on the boat, you name it! Taylor went tubing and kneeboarding too and he did a great job!

I think one of my favorite parts of the day was when we all piled in the boat and headed over to "the sandbar." On most lakes, the sandbar is the place where all the boats dock so that people can lay out and then jump in the water. Typically there's lots of drinking going on and some of the boats are playing music making it an all-out party. And this was no exception! In fact, they even had a "stage" which was effectively a pontoon boat with a HUGE sound system and they were blasting music! When we first pulled up, Kid Rock was playing which is just TOO funny for those of you who know is song "All Summer Long," which is basically a homage to this very culture in Michigan. We spent some time there tossing a frisbee and watching the drunk people try to dance in knee-deep water, it was awesome! Here's the only photo I could dig up:

We ate dinner shortly after the party and headed home after that, totally pooped but happy!

Monday
On Monday morning, we continued the marathon weekend by getting up at 4am AGAIN in order to make out 6:30 flight back to New York.

Thanks to my family and the Monroes for a great weekend!

Technology is amazing...

So, as you know, Taylor and I are training for the Chicago Marathon on 10/10/10. Well, I've been a little bit busy lately and haven't been able to blog as much as I like. I did however take some time to map our 15-mile run we did last weekend. Then, I found out that our good friends at Google have 3D video of the ENTIRE WORLD and can show you a 3-d video of the route we run. Here it is. Just to give you an overview, we basically did a lap in central park (the first 5 miles) and then ran down Park Avenue (the fast part) all the way to the Brooklyn Bridge and back. Enjoy!